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NEW RESEARCH ON VISION THERAPY

PUBLISHED IN ARCHIVES OF OPHTHALMOLOGY

by Dr. Leonard Press

Many parents, when faced with the prospect of their child doing vision therapy, wonder why they can’t simply be given something to do on their own at home.

For the first time, a landmark study published in the Archives of Ophthalmology in January 2005, shows conclusively that vision therapy done under supervision in an optometric office yields considerably better results than therapy done only at home.

The most common condition benefiting from vision therapy is known as “convergence insufficiency”. This is a difficulty in coordinating both eyes together effectively at near, as when reading. Some of the symptoms studied included:

• Eyes feeling tired or uncomfortable when reading
• Words moving, jumping, or unstable when reading
• Losing ones place while reading, or reading slowly
• Eye strain or fatigue when using a computer

This was a “gold standard” study. A prospective, multicenter clinical trial, with children age 9 through 18 randomly assigned to control, experimental, or placebo group. Simple, do-it-yourself exercises like “pencil push-ups”, as prescribed by most eye surgeons, had no significant effect on symptoms or clinical findings, with the placebo group showing 8% improvement as compared with 0% in the control group. In contrast, optometric vision therapy resulted in 53% of the patients being totally cured, and 80% improved.

This exciting study which matches the experiences that we, as clinicians, have had in our offices, can be found in: Scheiman M, Mitchell GL, Cotter S, et al. A randomized clinical trial of treatments for convergence insufficiency in children. Archives of Ophthalmology 2005;123:14-24.